I have a very simple requirement:I have three PCs; 1 Vista, 1 Win 7, and one win 10.

I want to upgrade the vista to win 7: But first I want to backup the vista c:drive to the win 7 e: drive somewhere.

So far a day spent googling and failing.Home groups is a total waste of space, because it won't share files.the vista machine doesn't sees the win & , but access is denied, so I can't push.I FINALLY got the 'pull' working by going into a number of 'advanced' settings on the vista machine:Turned of user access controlturned off password requirement for the userSet the 'shared permissions to Full access for everyone, and THENhad to go into the security settings as well and ADD everyone, with full access.Now the win 7 machine can get into the vista one and I'm finally copying.As for the win 7 to win 10: Still no progress on those. The machines can see each other OK but each of them refuses access to the other.

So presumably once vista IS updated to 7, I'm going to lose all the connections again.And as for my NAS: Haven't been able to use that since I left XP.

Not really wanting a 'solution' just bemoaning that such a simple need should be so difficult to achieve.

Much depends on which specific versions of Vista, Win 7 and Win 10 are being used. If any are the "Home" version(s), you find file sharing next to impossible on those devices. The "Pro" OS versions simply need their "File Sharing" turned on and be in the same workgroup or domain. File sharing between 10 and 7 got different and as long as neither are the "Home" version, they should be able to interact.

You can always use an external USB drive to push files to, for later extraction with any OS.

As for the NAS, recalling the securities used with it are vital for retrieving any data therefrom. Most people using NAS's at home have made the error of using all the default settings and were unaware of the security issues created when moving the NAS to a new network or attempting to re-associate it with a new PC and\or OS. If the data on the NAS is not important, it should be able to able to be reset back to factory settings, losing all the data. But then it can be set up for less constrained sharing of files.

I appreciate the struggle you're experiencing and I hope some of this helps.